Subject: RE: emacs, etc.

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 21:07:23 EDT

I think the real difference between "normal people" and "geeks" (not terms I 
thought I used -- but if the shoe fits,...) is not preparation but goal. As 
an academic, I know perhaps a half-dozen people who need and use emacs; I 
know at least an equal number who have it because it is cute or powerful or 
chic and who play with it but never use more than an electric typewriter's 
worth of it for doing their work. I used to collect programming languages the 
same way -- except that, with the exception of SNOBOL -- their claims to do 
something better or easier or... all proved illusory (i.e., outright lies); I 
have tried any new ones lately to see whether truth has improved.

As for the cost of Windows, they are excessive in some sense, though in the 
US, Windows tends to come with the computer (or, looking realistically at 
prices, the computer comes with the Windows and the rest of the package). 
And here also, students tend to have access to Windows machines and tools, 
even in a low tax state like Missouri (the companies tend to more or less 
give the critters to the university). In any case, the thousandfold plus 
increase in potential users does make Windows design appealing. It would be 
nice -- going back to programming languages -- if at least they had gotten 
standardized enough that a program (I mean just the marks on paper or screen) 
written in one environment would actually run as well in another environment 
of the same name -- stories of trying to take a BASIC program from CPM to DOS 
spring to mind.